A taxonomy construction approach supported by web content

Abstract

The growth of unstructured information available inside organizations and on the Web has motivated the building of structures for represent and manipulate such information. Particularly, an ontology provide a structural organizational knowledge to support the exchange and sharing. A crucial element within an ontology is the taxonomy. For building a taxonomy, the identification of hypernymy/hyponymy relations between terms is essential. Lexical patterns have been used in analysis of text for recovering hypernyms. In addition, the Web has been used as source of collective knowledge and it seems a good option for finding appropriate hypernyms. This paper describes an approach to get hypernymy relations between terms belonging to a specific domain knowledge. This approach combines WordNet synsets and context information for building an extended query set. This query set is sent to a web search engine in order to retrieve the most representative hypernym for a term. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.